Health briefs

November 12, 2012 12:01 AM

November 12, 2012 12:01 AM

UPMC Hamot has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award and also has been placed on its Target: Stroke Honor Roll.

Hamot is the only provider in the region to earn this level of designation.

To receive the Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award, UPMC Hamot achieved 85 percent or higher adherence to all Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Quality Achievement indicators for two or more consecutive 12-month intervals and achieved 75 percent or higher compliance with six of 10 Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Quality Measures.

UPMC Hamot also is included on the Target: Stroke Honor Roll for improving stroke care. Over the past quarter, at least 50 percent of UPMC Hamot's eligible ischemic stroke patients have received tissue plasminogen activator, a clot-busting agent, within 60 minutes of arriving at the hospital.

Mercyhurst prof discusses fracking on video blog

Pennsylvania has become the home of experimental fracking, Mercyhurst University professor David Dausey says in his latest video blog.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a controversial method to extract natural gas or petroleum from subterranean shale by using water to blast it open.

"Pennsylvania has opened up its doors to fracking in ways that many other states in the U.S. have not," said Dausey, chair of the university's Public Health Department. "We don't know enough about the environmental and human health effects of fracking and, as a result, Pennsylvania has become the home of experimental fracking."

Dausey's blog, "The Dausey File: Public Health News Today," can be found at http://publichealth.mercyhurst.edu/the_dausey_file/

Statins may lower risk of cancer death

If you take statins to lower your cholesterol, you may also be lowering your risk of death from cancer, new research suggests.

A report being published in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine is one of a number of recent papers suggesting that statins not only limit the growth of cancer cells but also make them more vulnerable to certain therapies.

"Regular statin use before and after a diagnosis of cancer could theoretically reduce cancer-related mortality," wrote study leader Sune F. Nielsen, a biochemist at the University of Copenhagen who based his findings on an analysis of more than 5.5 million people in Denmark.